Rice with everything in the lunar café

THE Japanese are already planning menus for future visitors to the Moon. But life-support specialists say that lunar agriculture won't necessarily be any easier because of the discovery of water.

"From a life-support standpoint, we'd still have to recycle the water," says Don Henniger of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. "But the lunar water could give us more flexibility while we get the systems up and running." Guy Fogleman, leader of the advanced human systems technology programme at NASA's headquarters in Washington DC, suspects that it may still be easier to irrigate lunar crops with water shipped from Earth. "The level of importance of this discovery for life support is difficult to say," he says.

Meanwhile, as part of a government-sponsored plan to develop technology for activities on the Moon's surface, Japanese researchers have produced mature rice in a record 100 days. They say the rice could supply lunar ...

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